Reviews for History and Progress of Education, from the Earliest Times to the Present. Intended as a Man...

The average rating for History and Progress of Education, from the Earliest Times to the Present. Intended as a Man... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-04-07 00:00:00 Matthew Schaaf I picked this up because I'd just been reading The Newcombes, which features Pendennis as a character and as the supposed first-person narrator of the later novel. Of course, that that pretty much deprived me of all suspense as to which young lady was his destined bride, whom Laura would end up marrying, the eventual course of his career, etc - and inadvertently starting off on Volume II of the set didn't improve matters in that respect either! I have to say that I really wouldn't have recognised the Arthur Pendennis of this book in the person of the narrator of "The Newcombes" - he has no identifiable narrative voice in common between the two books - and, to be honest, I'm not sure I could distinguish him from Clive Newcombe, the protagonist of that novel, either. Neither of them are all that distinctive as characters, being pretty much stamped out of the standard mould of fresh-faced and manly (and infinitely respectful of the weaker sex) young heroes of 19th-century literature. As with Dickens, it tends to be the minor characters and/or the villains who are more interesting, although Laura is less generic than the average virtuous heroine because she is bright enough and strong minded enough to see through the self-deceptions of those around her, despite having grown up in an entirely sheltered existence. There is a distinct satirical flavour to the novel, as with Thackeray's other work, which left me a little uncertain as to how much of the authorial moralising we are being intended to take literally, and how much is deliberate subversion; sometimes he addresses himself explicitly to the male reader and sometimes to the female reader, and I'm not sure we're necessarily expected to take that at face value. One feels that he is entirely capable of advocating a Jonathan Swift-style morality and expecting the reader to pick up on it! The plot of the novel, such as it is, is basically the romantic misadventures of a young man with pretensions to gentility - sufficient for him to mix in London society for the narrator's purposes, but insufficient enough for the narrator to draw morals from the idle and indebted rich, and poke fun at the son of an apothecary passing as a landed gentleman. I didn't find Pen's ventures into romance all that enthralling, possibly because I already knew the outcome; one wonders how much of the sketches of the literary, legal and newspaper society of the era is autobiographical material. It's also interesting to watch the Victorians (who basically invented the concept of nostalgia and the historical novel) waxing romantic about the simple pleasures of an earlier (Regency) era - and salutary to remind us that the 18th and 19th centuries were not one long 'period' entity, but saw just as much massive social and industrial change as the 20th century, while seeing themselves as ultra-modern all the time!

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-05 00:00:00 Ken Burton I have both volumes, and both have horribly torn up spines.